Mac won't boot after Tiger Update from Panther!

Hello to all:

I've got a problem. I've just done an upgrade to Tiger from Panther (10.3.x) and now my MAC won't boot. All I get is the international "NO!" symbol in the centre of my screen (the circle with the diagonal bar).

This MAC was fully functional and absolutely stable before I did the upgrade. I used the install DVD straight out of the box. The installation went perfectly smoothly and at the end it restarted itself. Then on restart the familiar Apple logo came up with the spinning deal below (NOT the beachball of death), after about a minute the logo changed to above mentioned "NO!" symbol and the spinner kept spinning until I did a safe shutdown.

This has repeated after each restart.

I booted off of the install DVD and tried Disk Utilities, ran a Repair Disk and it found no problems. On restart, same problem.

I called a buddy who suggested I "Repair Permissions".

Anybody know what the "NO!" symbol signifies? Anybody have any suggestions before I spend my whole Sunday erasing, reloading and reinstalling a ton of Applications?

BTW. As I am the only user of the machine, and I trust my staff, I do not use any passwords, multiuser logins or administration security, as I find them a nuisance.

Save my Sunday snooze time, please!

Steve

Have you tried holding down option (alt) on startup to bring up the boot disk selection, make sure your Mac's hard disk is selected and click the right pointing arrow.

Maybe this will work?

Vicky

Never heard of a mac doing that before...
But it reminds me of what the iPod displays when it's mounted on another system.

Do you have any firewire cables connected to your computer? Try unplugging everything except the power, keyboard, mouse and monitor (if it has one).

Also make sure the DVD isn't still in the drive (eject it by holding down the left mouse button when you hear the apple chime).

Hey there:

I tried all the stuff mentioned by Vicky (Lil) and Ampliphonic. Thanks to you both for your suggestions. In the end, know what I did?

I reinstalled 10.3! Tomorrow with a non-Sunday fuzzy head, I'll do the updates to 10.3.9...Screw it! And my MAC is working just fine, I didn't need to erase my drive and I haven't lost any of my emails, settings, applications, dock stuff. And I'm happily gonna stay with 10.3.x until I can find out what went crazy.

I'm gonna try to get with the Apple Techies tomorrow to ask then about the Circle and slash icon means.

Now perhaps you can help me one more time. Because I had a 10.4 system installed, and then I did an archive and install to try to fix that one...and I resinstalled 10.3, I now have two "Previous System" folders on my drive. CAN I THROW THESE AWAY?

Steve

Try doing a full install with 10.4, upgrading takes forever to install and runs very slow afterwards. when I upgraded my version, I ran the full install and had no problems.

This same thing happened to me recently. Once you get your computer back up and running go to system preferences>startup disk and make sure mac os x 10.blah.blah is selected. This cleared it right up for me. Hope this helps

Now perhaps you can help me one more time. Because I had a 10.4 system installed, and then I did an archive and install to try to fix that one...and I resinstalled 10.3, I now have two "Previous System" folders on my drive. CAN I THROW THESE AWAY?

Click to expand...

If your current system is running the way it was before and you don't have any other issues - then yeah.

Basically it is your old 10.3 and 10.4. system installations minus your personal files. (Those are always transferred to the last system you've installed when you archive & install).

So as long as you're sure you don't want/need to go back to one of the other installations then go ahead and delete them.

This was a retail copy of Tiger that up upgraded to? I've actually seen people try to upgrade with a oem copy of the software on a different machine (technically illegal) and it cause that symbol due to hardware differences (I'm assuming).

For Example - We had an iMac G5 here that got RMA'd and replaced with one of the new spec G5's. Curious on how much of a change there was between the two, we placed our old(4mo old) G5 image on to the new iMac. Restart and WHAM! we get the no NO NO!!! Had to create a new image for those suckas.